\ \ \ 1 I I : i j ; I I I \ I I \ \ \ \ \ -- -- ---- LJ -- {) 55 c:C3 I v-1r Ji:Ó 0 0 '--t. 0 0 ð I y I __ """ C$." .. .. --- "I don't know wlzether n ortgage rates lzad gone up. N ow may I continue?" Games, summer and winter, she has generally acted as if she were the most important woman on earth, which for those few quadrennial weeks she may well have been. Here at Lake Placid, she referred to the slaughter at the Munich OIYlnpics as "a happening" (those Games, she said at one point, "succeeded to a finish," an odd choice of verbiage), and to the invasion of Afghanistan as a happening, too. When she was asked if it seemed ap- propriate to hold Olympic Games in the capital of a war-waging nation, she remarked that many nations could be considered to be at war today, among them Lord Killanin's Ire- land-the only time anybody intro- duced that political situation Into the ruffled Lake Placid scene. "We should try to unite and not to disunite" was Mme. Berlioux's advice to the world. Lord Killanin, who is sixty-five and, like Madame, studied at the Sor- bonne (and also, in his case, at E ton and Cambridge), used to be a film pro- ducer, as Michael Killanin, and may, these headachy days, be sorry he didn't stick exclusively to that. He is a mem- ber of the French Sports Academy and the International Association of Art Critics. He is a Leo. I know that be- cause he said so, in remarking one day that he was so busy he hadn't had time to read his horoscope. Soon after he reached Lake Placid, he said that he - u . . had come here principally to watch the Games, an asseveration nobody took very seriously-his seat at the climactic ice-hockey confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union was empty-and that, whatever Secretary Vance or President Carter or anybody else said or did, the Summer Games would not be postponed, cancelled, or removed from Moscow. "I am sur- prised at the immense misunderstand- ing of what can and cannot be done," he declared. Outwardly genial and roly-poly, he is by nature tough and unbending. When he appeared hatless and gloveless at the frigid so-called opening ceremony (six hockey games had already been played) , someone described him as bareheaded and bare- fisted. (Standing in for President Car- ter there, Vice-President Mondale- who returned to the contests, along with Amy Carter, to see the United States hockey team, composed largely of fellow-Minnesotans, sweep to gold- en victory-uttered exactly twenty- six words, which may not be a new Olympic record but was surely the shortest public oration ever delivered by a practicing politician in a Presi- dential-election year.) Only once dur- ing the Games did I hear Lord Kil- lanin's omnipotence challenged. That was when he did show up for an event, a pairs-figure-skating one, and a woman wearing a "Press Steward" badge was told by a Pinkerton guard to prepare herself for His Lordship's arrival. She drew herself up haughtily and said, "Lord Killanin is not the press." It made me tingle all over. There were in the pairs figure skat- ing, as in most events, both United States and Soviet competitors. Lord Killanin's applause conveyed no par- tiality, and not much enthusiasm, ei- ther; he clapped as tepidly as if Cyrus Vance had been essaying a double axel on the ice. It was ridiculous for the I.O.C. or any other group to believe that na- tional rivalries and animosities could be excluded from the Lake Placid Games, any more than they have been from any other Olympics since, say, 1956, when the Summer Games were played in Melbourne, about the time Hungary was featured on the Soviet menu. In- deed, among the reasons cited in the Olympic oath for participation in the modern Games, the words "for the glory of sport" precede "for the honor of our teams"-and presumably our countries. Among the musical numbers inaptly chosen for choral rendition at the first formal meeting of the I.O.C., when Secretary Vance's sober exhorta- tions were stonily received, was "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," which, with its mingled appeals to bellicosity and Christian worship, could hardly have been expected to put all the mem.